Thanks all, I appreciate the well wishes and sympathy. Here’s hoping our toddler figures out sleeping through the night sometime soon.
Am I secretly a Type A careerist?
So obviously I’ve been applying for jobs lately which means I’ve been spending more time on LinkedIn. I’ll see updates from former coworkers and classmates in my feed— Mike is at AirBnB, Daniel went to Netflix, Dana is at Anthropic, Miles is at OpenAI, etc. Some of these people I’m like, yeah, obviously, you’re great and I’m so glad you found a good role! Sometimes though, I inwardly give a side-eye,
What, him? God save his future coworkers.
In either case, though, I’m starting to feel pangs of envy. I see these people moving up in their careers and at companies which seem to have, I don’t know, a future? Whereas I feel like I’m stuck at my current place, diving daily into the job postings for opportunities and coming up empty. I know I’ve said this before, but the job market for product right now is
bleak. Theoretically AI/ML is all the rage right now or whatever, but that really hasn’t panned out in terms of opportunities. Some click-baity articles online say that the AI revolution has come for tech and that’s what’s causing the continued layoffs. Hah, no. Outsourcing, that’s what’s in vogue. Everywhere I’m seeing posts only for India-based teams.
Meanwhile, crypto has been on a rampage. At this rate, within 2-3 months, our net worth should be at a point that if I lost my job and never got hired again, we could probably survive. It would be leaner, for sure, and we wouldn’t have the college fund ready or be able to do a renovation to add some more space to our place, but we’d survive.
Which then makes me wonder— Why do I care so much about my career right now? Why am I so angry about not getting promoted? Why am I so scared of the prospect of being shut out of future product roles if I get laid off?
I think part of it is that I’m not ready for the gravy train to end, not yet. I want a nice financial cushion before I bow out and I haven’t checked all those boxes.
The other part though is careerist vanity. If I’m being honest sometimes I think about the annoying people I’ve come across in my career and think about how I need to succeed to, I don’t know, show them I can? Living well’s the best revenge and all that, but that means you’re only winning if things are going well. There’s also the imposter syndrome in my own head. How do I know I’m worthwhile if other people don’t validate me with money, praise, etc. It’s brain-infecting nonsense, but it’s there. It’s there.